…Cyberthieves are
using such so-called malware to steal banking credentials from unsuspecting
consumers when they log on to their bank accounts via their mobile phones,
according to law-enforcement officials and cybersecurity specialists.

It is difficult to quantify how much money has been stolen
as a result of the mobile-phone malware, mostly because the thieves can access
an account through any normal channel after they steal credentials through a
phone. Still, the prevalence of the
malware is significant enough that it has caught the attention of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and U.S. banking regulators.

…The malware
typically gets onto a phone when a user clicks on a text message from an
unknown source or taps an advertisement on a website. Once installed, it often lies dormant until
the user opens a banking app.

…The Federal
Reserve said earlier this year that 53% of smartphone users with bank accounts
had used mobile banking in the previous 12 months, up from 43% in 2011.

…A recent study
conducted by SAS and Javelin Strategy & Research found that fewer than
one-third of smartphone owners use mobile antivirus or anti-malware software on
their phones.

58 Percent of Small Businesses Already Have International
Customers, Survey Finds

Small businesses are breaking barriers and going
international, a new study by foreign exchange company USForex has found.

The survey shows 58 percent of small businesses already
have international customers, while 72 percent plan to grow their international
customer base by 2017. About 96 percent
of these small businesses, in fact, are confident about conducting business
abroad.

“Going global is no longer an option for successful small-
and medium-sized businesses — it’s a strategic imperative,” said Karin Visnick,
head of North America, USForex.

A federal appeals court has
upheld New York City’s program of warrantless and continuous GPS surveillance
of taxi drivers, ruling that drivers are not
protected by the Fourth Amendment’s bar on unreasonable searches and
seizures when on the job.The Rutherford Institute appealed to the
Second Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of taxi drivers who were being forced
by government officials to attach GPS tracking devices to their taxis.

In a 2-1 decision, the Second
Circuit held that taxi drivers do not have a protected privacy interest in the
vehicles they drive. The dissenting
opinion, issued by Circuit Judge Rosemary S. Pooler, takes issue with the lower
court’s premise that taxi drivers should be stripped of all Fourth Amendment
protections. Rebutting the view that the
government’s surveillance is conspicuous, that taxis are not truly private
property, and that the tracking system was installed pursuant to regulations,
Pooler declared, “The physical invasion of a constitutionally protected area is
no less actionable under the Fourth Amendment merely because it is conspicuous.
To hold
otherwise would allow the government to conduct unreasonable searches merely by
announcing them.”

Facebook is trying to get rid of bias in Trending news by
getting rid of humans

Facebook will no longer employ humans to write
descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy
over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will
now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the
number of people discussing it on the social network.

Quartz confirmed from multiple sources that Facebook has
laid off the entire editorial staff on the Trending team—15-18 workers
contracted through a third party. The Trending team will now be staffed entirely by
engineers, who will work to check that topics and articles surfaced
by the algorithms are newsworthy.

Will this change when Google starts sending users to news sites
outside the EU?

Internet Companies May Have to Pay Publishers for News Under
New EU Rules

News aggregators like Alphabet Inc.’s
Google news search may have to pay publishers to list snippets of articles on
their websites under plans by the European Union’s executive body to update the
bloc’s copyright rules.

In my "Ultimate Guide to Raspberry Pi Operating
Systems" (Part
1, Part
2, and Part
3) I listed pretty much every noteworthy operating system and OS variant
available for the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers. But what of the hardware all this OS goodness
runs on? It's not like there's just one
Raspberry Pi board. So, if you don't
know your Model A from your Zero from your generation 3 Model B, this is the
guide for you.

…“Members of
Congress are in an unusual position as they demand an explanation for Mylan
NV's 400 percent price hike for the EpiPen and focus attention
squarely on its CEO: Heather Bresch,” Bloomberg
reports. Bresch, whose father is a
senator from West Virginia, had successfully lobbied to have
Epipens, which contain life-saving anti-allergy medication, be purchased by
public schools. Bresch had previously
been involved
in another education-related scandal when, in 2007, it was revealed she had
been awarded an MBA by West Virginia University even though
she’d only completed half of the required credits.

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do
not support so called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel
invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not
condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where
individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

Friday, August 26, 2016

Very interesting, to me anyway.If I can short a stock and then drive the
price down, I better be able to make my information at least reasonably
believable.If I state that the claims
are “absolutely untrue” I better not have any information that they might
be.Interesting area to debate.

More on a situation I noted
yesterday. This approach to
using/monetizing vulnerability discoveries is downright scary…. but will it
work to improve security? Here’s one of
your must-reads for today.

Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley report:

When a team of hackers discovered
that St. Jude Medical Inc.’s pacemakers and defibrillators had security vulnerabilities
that could put lives at risk, they didn’t
warn St. Jude.Instead, the
hackers, who work for cybersecurity startup MedSec, e-mailed Carson Block, who
runs the Muddy Waters Capital LLC investment firm, in May. They had a
money-making proposal.

MedSec suggested an unprecedented
partnership: The hackers would provide data proving the medical devices were
life-threatening, with Block taking a short position against St. Jude.

[…]

MedSec is taking a path that some
frustrated security experts believe is the only way to create fundamental
change: find a way to impose significant monetary penalties on companies it
believes are negligent when it comes to protecting consumers. But the startup is doing so in ways that
violate some of the most basic standards of ethical security research and in an
industry where the stakes are especially high.

While Jones’ supporters have been vocal with their outrage
and Department of Homeland Security
investigators are looking into the breach of Jones’ website that
exposed intimate photos and personal documents

…Those who broke
into Jones’ site and replaced its usual content with naked photos, a driver’s
license and racist video are clearly breaking the law, said attorney Jonathan
Steinsapir, but “trolling” a celebrity with sexist or racist posts online is
not a crime.

…Most often,
though, technology moves faster than the law.

“The availability of media now and how quickly information
spreads — I don’t think the law has kept up with that,” said Steinsapir, who
specializes in intellectual property and copyright law.

For example, once stolen photos are disseminated online,
it’s not only tough to track who’s republishing them, it’s practically
impossible to prosecute.

…And all the
experts agree: Taking naked photos and storing them digitally is probably a bad
idea.

(Related?) What is they were given the information?What is they had not been “celebrities?”

Police State America has devised
a new way to track dissidents or person’s of interest, they’re calling it
Pay-By-Plate. Raytheon’s Pay-By-Plate
system will allow police to “Hotlist” motorists across the country.

According to the Boston
Globe, officials are working with the Executive Office of Public Safety and
Security to draft a list of all situations that warrant “Hotlist” use.

What is the
blockchain? If you don't know, you
should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it
actually works. Don Tapscott is here to
help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he
says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and
holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.

This is the field I’m sending my Ethical Hacking students
out to conquer.

The researchers say the surveillance software was the work of
NSO Group Technologies Ltd., which sells primarily to government agencies. The researchers, at Citizen Lab, a group that
investigates surveillance technology, and at mobile-security firm Lookout Inc.,
say they discovered the software in a link sent earlier this month to the phone
of Ahmed Mansoor, a human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates.

Their report sheds new light on the capabilities of
private security companies to produce sophisticated software for
state-sponsored spying. It also suggests
that the iOS operating system behind Apple’s iPhones isn't as impregnable as it
appeared earlier this year, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation struggled
for weeks and ultimately paid
$1 million to unlock a phone tied to the San Bernardino terror attack.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday published
a patent application filed by Apple describing a method for the company to capture both a
thief’s picture, video, and fingerprints from the Touch ID home button, among
other identifying data.

This is rather sad actually. None of the government entities were willing
to put this into their budgets, so we need to force them to borrow money to do
it?

The United States chief information officer on Thursday
boosted his push for Congress to approve $3 billion in loans to modernize
government technology.

Tony Scott
emphasized the importance of a government-wide shift from obsolete technologies
to more secure, cheaper, modern options, calling for the creation of the
Information Technology Modernization Fund (ITMF).

…The ITMF,
currently under debate in Congress, would provide $3.1 billion in loans for
agencies to update technology. The money would be repaid through the cost savings
of using the more efficient technologies.

Advertising for the Pokémon generation?Clearly, these ads will not reach me.

Ride-hailing giant Uber lost at least $1.27 billion before
interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the first six months of 2016,
Bloomberg reported on
Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

Thanks to a form of AI
called deep learning, computers are now really good at telling the difference between
a dog and a cat. But Facebook’s
Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab wants to make machine vision far
more useful, going well beyond digital parlor tricks.

FAIR research scientist Piotr Dollar says the first step
lies in helping machines not just recognize that a particular thing appears in
a photo—say, a cat or a chair or a gun—but spot each individual detail in a
photo and understand where it sites in relation to everything else. His team has built a set of tools
that does just that.

…But Facebook
isn’t actually using these particular machine vision tools yet. As with FastText,
a set of tools that could be used for spotting spam and clickbait that the
company recently open source, the FAIR team opted to release its work to the
public early, before it’s found a particular application at the company.

Introducing Amazon Vehicles, a Car
Research Destination and Automotive Community

Amazon today announced Amazon
Vehicles, a car research destination and automotive community that makes it
easy for customers to get the information they need when shopping for vehicles,
parts, and accessories.

My local library (Koelbel) is having a big book sale starting Sept 8th.
On Sunday, you can buy a grocery bag
full of books for $6.I can see that
this game might be worth $6 (or more) just to watch the kids play!

Inspired by the success of Pokemon Go, a Belgian primary
school headmaster has developed an online game for people to search for books
instead of cartoon monsters, attracting tens of thousands of players in weeks.

While with Pokemon Go,
players use a mobile device's GPS and camera to track virtual creatures around
town, Aveline Gregoire's version is played through a Facebook group called
"Chasseurs de livres" ("Book hunters").https://www.facebook.com/groups/554284188095002/

Players post pictures and
hints about where they have hidden a book and others go to hunt them down. Once someone has finished reading a book, they
"release" it back into the wild.

…Though it
was only set up a few weeks ago, more than 40,000 people are already signed up
to Gregoire's Facebook group.

The hidden tomes range from
books for toddlers through to Stephen King horrors, placed around Belgian towns
and countryside, often wrapped in clear plastic to keep off the rain.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.